Retail establishments such as food markets vend upwards of thousands of items on shelves and in display cases. Retail establishments carrying such products must be able to display signage in conjunction therewith which is not only attractive but informative to consumers.
Various departments within retail food markets repeatedly carry the same or similar items. For example, a seafood department would routinely carry farmed or wild salmon meaning that signage which informs the consumer that such products are available for sale can be reused multiple times. However, the price of such products can vary significantly and, as a consequence, the need presents itself to enable the merchant to repeatedly use informative signage where pricing can be varied as needed.
In addition to the above, most retail food markets employ computerized tracking systems to enable merchants to determine which products are successfully being purchased and which remain on store shelves. This information is critical to enable a vendor to maximize profitability by eliminating from store shelves those products which are not being purchased while enabling the vendor to effectively reorder those products which its data system indicates are successful and thus being depleted in inventory. As such, in addition to employing primary signs to inform a customer of the nature of the products being sold and a secondary sign for providing pricing information, the secondary sign can also contain a good deal of information which is necessary for product tracking through computerized databases but which would detract from the visually appealing impact which product signage should otherwise create. Providing such primary signage was the subject of applicant's parent applications identified above.
Applicant's parent applications focused on the use of secondary signage which displays the price of the product being vended together with additional information which would be obscured by appropriate sizing of a window configured within the primary sign. As such, when pricing changed, the secondary sign located behind the primary sign would be withdrawn and either discarded or saved for possible future use to be replaced by another secondary sign containing the appropriate product pricing information.
It has been realized by applicant that many products sold in retail food markets although differing in price from time to time, quite often are priced somewhat consistently. For example, once a food product is introduced to consumers, the price point would be established. That price point may drop to meet competitor's prices or if the product is perishable and begins approaching its maximum shelf life to encourage its purchase. These pricing patterns, again, tend to follow a somewhat repeatable cycle so that the retail food establishment could oftentimes predict price points for specific products being sold.
Even when there is a degree of predictability in product pricing, many products go through cycles which require pricing variations. This may result in having to inventory perhaps four or more different secondary pricing signages which a store clerk would access for different products and during the life cycle of a single product. In order to reduce costs and provide for a simpler routine for displaying price changes and adjustments, the present invention proposes a secondary sign providing for pricing flexibility unavailable from signage products of the prior art.
These and further objects will be readily apparent when considering the following disclosure and appended claims.